The Hero and The Man: An Interview with C. B. Robertson

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:21):
All right, welcome back murmered On's. Today, I have a
special guest, Christopher Robertson. He is also known as Caffeine
and Philosophy on the socials, and I keep wanting to
call you Caffeine and Philosophy, but that's not your name.
He's the author of Hero and the Man, a look
at Homeric archetypes and the meaning of Homer and the
modern age. Do his writing and lectures and online work,

(00:44):
he explores why Homer still matters thousands of years later,
and you know, that's a topic near and dear to
my heart, not just as literature, but as a guide
to heroism, identity, suffering, which you talk about with your
archetypes in your book, and what it means to be human.
He has also just released a new course called Understanding Homer,

(01:06):
which is a year long deep dive designed to help
modern readers build a genuine connection with the poet at
the roots of Western civilization today. He joins us to
talk about all things Homer, from Achilles and Odysseus to
mythic archetypes, the legacy of epic poetry, and why these
ancient stories continue to resonate so powerfully in the modern world.

(01:30):
Welcome Christopher.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Well, thank you so much for having me, and thank
you for that very lovely plug for the course. I'm
very excited about that. We've got four students signed up
so far, and this will actually be the third run through,
although it's a consolidated version. I've been doing a two
year version of that curriculum for the last two and
a half years approximately.

Speaker 3 (01:50):
It's been wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:52):
That's great shruable. Where can people find information about this
course if they were interested in taking it?

Speaker 2 (01:59):
Going to to caffeine and philosophy dot com and the
backslash Homer, you should be able to find the tab
from the homepage will take you to the to the
landing page such as it is. I'm no marketing expert
or anything like that, but where it'll give a run
through of the information and how to contact me and
get involved and all that good stuff.

Speaker 1 (02:21):
You want to just give us a little run through
about what the course is exactly. And because I was
intrigued by that, I mean, that's a that is no
easy feat to put together something totally focused in on
like Homer like that.

Speaker 2 (02:37):
So sure, well, so the inspiration I have to I
have to begin you very generously proselytized my course, so
I have to I have to proselytize the man who
inspired the course. And really I have enjoyed and loved
Homer for gosh, the better part of fifteen years. But
that interest was really kicked into higher gear about five

(02:59):
or six years ago when I came across a wonderful,
absolutely lovely academic named Greg Nage. He's the I believe
he is still the chair of Greek Studies or something
at Harvard. Had the wonderful pleasure of interviewing him a
few years back. But he he's written owned books, including
the Best of the Achaeans, and many many others. But

(03:21):
the extraordinary work is called The Ancient Greek hero in
twenty four Hours, and it is basically a course on
the meaning of what heroism is. And one of the
points that Greg Nage brought up is the structure of
the epic poetry. There. How, the order not just of
the lines, but of the words in the first in

(03:43):
the opening sections are really very much like copywriting for
newspapers today. You begin with a headline, and then there's
a subheading, and then there's a summary, and then you
get into the chronology and the opening lines of Homer
are much like that. So when we open up with
it's like that is telling us some of the themes
the subject matter.

Speaker 3 (04:03):
Of what this is about.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
It's a wonderful book. I can't recommend it highly enough,
and it is part of the reading that we'll do
in the one year course, at least the first half,
because it's a brick of a book, and there's a
lot to cover with Homer, especially if we're reading the
Iliad in the Odyssey as well. But it got me
question wondering, like, you know the word menace, which one

(04:25):
of Greg Naja's friends, Leonard Muhlner, wrote an entire book
about just the word menace. The Anger of Achilles is
what's called another wonderful book. But one of the main
themes of the Iliad that really shaped the values of
Western culture in general is this idea of the hero heroism.

(04:46):
And it's right there in the opening line men who
are made feasts for the birds and dogs in thettlefield
who were heroes. Right, it's the word is right there.
But what's our opening word with the Odyssey? Andra Man
sing man of the music, And so we have this
ideal of the hero presented in the Iliad, and we

(05:07):
have this ideal of the man presented in the Odyssey
that is in some sense different, but there's overlap. And
so my book The Hero and the Man was an
attempt to bring those two together and to explore that
relationship between the two because, as we were talking about
a little bit before we hit record, as your mentor said,
for many people there are either Iliad people or Odyssey people.

Speaker 3 (05:30):
And I've had that experience too.

Speaker 2 (05:31):
When I was in my late teens and early twenties,
I was very much an Iliad person. But then as
you get older, you come to come to kind of
understand this strange character Odysseus a little bit more. He
is a I believe James Joyce wrote Ulysses because he
viewed Odysseus as the most developed character in all of
Western literature. And that's coming from the consummate literary genius

(05:54):
of the twentieth century, not someone who's writing I like.
By the way, I'm not an I'm not a Joyce fan,
but I can respect the skill. I can respect the
talent and the and the vision, the insight to see
what Homer was doing with that character.

Speaker 1 (06:09):
I came when I was studying with Victor Hanson. They
was reading I wasn't reading any Homer, and so I was.
I had been studying with the late doctor Diane Harris,
and she was my original thesis chair, and through reading
I did her course with Alexander. And then I wrote
my you know, my thesis on Alexander and the story.

(06:31):
And I think it's Plutarch that tells the story that
he sleeps with the copy of the Iliad under his pillow,
you know. And I thought, I was so enamored with,
you know, this complicated Alexander. What would make somebody like
that want to have some epic poem under his pillow?
And you know that.

Speaker 2 (06:50):
Was actually me in my early twenties. I had my
little Barnes and Noble's copy of the Laying translation of
the Iliad. I was truck driving over the.

Speaker 1 (06:58):
Road and I thought, well, I'm going to just read this.
I'm going to read some Homer. I'm going to read
some Homer. Can you imagine how naive I was back
in like nineteen ninety three or something like that, ninety
four somewhere in there. I was more drawn to the
Odyssey at that point in my life, and I saw

(07:19):
the Odyssey as much more of a some kind of
romantic story. So I was more drawn to that at
that point in my life, and as I got older,
I became an iliad person. Interesting because I thought that
the things that Achilles had to go through seemed to

(07:39):
mirror the difficulty of life and like the choices, like
he had a choice. You know, we like to think
in the modern world that we have this choice of
you know, we can choose the left or the right
and you know, go about our life. And Achilles had
the choice of to have that long life and to
not be famous basically, you know what Brad Pitt say

(08:02):
in the movie Troy, like nobody will know your name,
you know, in a phrase, or he could die young
and have glory. And I thought, that's not even a
choice for a young man. He's he's you know at
the time that his that that's revealed to him that
he has this dual fate, and no other human being

(08:22):
has that dual fate. He alone, that's that's a big responsibility.
And that's why I think his relationship with his mother
was so close, because she understood what the choice would mean,
and she also knew that he would choose war, and
that's why she tried to I took in my writing.
I took the story that she tried to burn his

(08:43):
mortality away, and it's not the river Stick story. I
didn't go with that version, but it doesn't matter which
version you go with. Thetis wanted to make her son
immortal because she knew she knew that he would choose war.
And you know, at this young guy that, you know,
sixteen seventeen, of course he's gonna choose war, because that's

(09:03):
what young men do, yes. And I didn't think that
was much of a choice because I you know, and
I teach high school students and juniors and seniors, so
you know, the young people don't think that death will
come for them.

Speaker 2 (09:17):
Yeah. One of the other great juxtapositions between the Iliad
and the Odyssey is this theme of fate. On the
one hand, in the Iliad Versus, because there's this grand
sense of fate. One of the opening lines is, but
the will of Zeus was moving towards its end, you know,
and who can escape the fate of the gods. Whereas

(09:38):
what we open up with in the Odyssey is that
same Zeus complaining about how all the mortals are blaming
the gods for what they themselves compound and with their
own recklessness and stupidity. And it's it's both. It's it's
not either or that there is fate, and that fate
is acknowledged in that complaint, but they're saying but they

(09:58):
make it even worse than it had to be. And
so there is a there's a sense of a direction
that is inescapable. And Achilles is very interesting for having
this dual path that is so clear, because I think
for most people the roads are not obvious what the
choices are, and so to have just two paths is

(10:19):
very It sort of highlights the points that you have
two fates. It's not one, you know, you can choose,
but we kind of know what direction is going to go.
And I'm sure the old men in the Iliad sense this,
because so much of the drama of the Iliad is
old men effortfully but vainly trying to guide the younger, passionate,

(10:40):
themodic young men on the path of wisdom, and they
they never quite take it, you know.

Speaker 1 (10:46):
I think that's that must be a complaint of all elders,
excuse me, of all youngers. I think I remember my
dad telling me that, and this is a story, so
I didn't verify this. But when my dad tells me
something about the middle I believe it because he's a
lifetime military man. So he said that in the in

(11:06):
the Navy, there's a reason why fighter pilots are young
because once, once, they once a man realizes his mortality,
he can't he's no good anymore. He can't be a
fighter pipe he can't, he can't be top Gun. In
other words, it was just this idea. And I don't
know if I think what he was saying was that,
you know, when you're young, you you don't think about dying,

(11:29):
like you don't think that you can. And once you
really and once you realize that you can die in combat,
you hold back. You're a little more cautious.

Speaker 3 (11:38):
You know.

Speaker 2 (11:39):
Uh, you brought up Navy fighter poets. I like to
I like to bring this up. It's not quite accurate,
but it's close enough that I like to bring it up. Anyways,
my favorite adaptation of the Iliad Troy was pretty good,
but my favorite of all time is Top Gun. And
it's funny because if it was an adaptation of the Iliad,
it was completely subconscious. There's no way like it's far
enough off the plot line in terms of the order

(12:01):
of things that it's clear that no one was directly
influenced by it. But it sort of illustrates how deeply
in the psyche to borrow a Greek word of the
Western subconscious. These stories and these themes are the death
of Goose is the death of Patriclus, right, Maverick's withdrawal
is the withdrawal of Achilles, now that the order is

(12:22):
not quite right, but the theme of withdrawal from combat,
and then the return in the moment of need to
become the Soultaire, to become the savior of the men
who are relying upon you from the greatest man who
the generals don't like because he does his own thing.
It's it's it's kind of all there.

Speaker 1 (12:42):
I never actually thought of that. That's great because I'm
I'm going to be teaching top gun. I teach history
in film, and so I use that I guess that
film to look at propaganda, because well, yeah, it's very
it's very positive for us. And my point is is
when I tell the kids, is it's very easy to

(13:03):
see World War two propaganda, you know, but when it's propaganda,
it doesn't feel like propaganda when it's your country, when
it's your nationale, when it's your nationalism or pride, it's
much harder to see the mess, you know, to see that.
But making that Iliad connection is also now I'm going
to layer that in.

Speaker 2 (13:23):
Well, I it seemed especially relevant to your point because
that's what happens to Cougar at the beginning. He sees
his mortality and then he can't do it anymore.

Speaker 1 (13:31):
Yeah, he's like nope.

Speaker 2 (13:33):
But even the point of sorry, go ahead, No.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
That's that's okay, I was thinking and Goose being Patrick
Liz is good. I like that connection. M hm, go ahead.

Speaker 2 (13:41):
But even the propaganda point is interesting because one of
the characters that especially passionate young men latch onto at
the Iliad, not not Achilles, because he's a he's a
cry baby and other things. Well, we can get into
that a little bit. But is Diamedes. Yeah, and Diamedes
is a fun illustration of the propaganda question because propaganda

(14:04):
can be true, Propaganda can amplify and accentuate and draw
our focus to things that are true. But maybe focus
upon him maybe more than we should or so forth,
And there's this great scene in I believe it's book
four where Agamemnon is going up and down berating the soldiers,
basically insulting them and challenging them to prove themselves. And

(14:25):
Diomedes charioteer is about to talk back and say, how
dare you insult this great warrior? And Diomye says, no, no, no, no,
he's doing his job. Let us, like we know what
he's doing. He's trying to write. Let us allow ourselves
to be riled up and prove ourselves in this way.
And I think on the other side of understanding when

(14:46):
things are propaganda, which is important, and there's always a
danger of disillusionment when we see that the story was
just propaganda. But on the other side of that, we
can make that diamediate choice, like conjugating that correctly, diamedic.

Speaker 1 (15:02):
Dynastic I get it. We can use it.

Speaker 2 (15:04):
Where we can. We can say, okay, is this taking
the point a little bit too far? Yeah, a little bit,
but we'll we'll allow it to rile us up a
little bit, so long as we're being moderate and wise
in our in our choices and not to be disillusioned
like theirsighte's and thinking that everything is propaganda and that

(15:25):
there's nothing worth doing because every point can be turned
into propaganda. Every perspective can be advanced with propaganda.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
I think when the propaganda turns into like denigrating the enemy,
I think that's where it's dangerous, because then you start
underestimating what they may be capable of.

Speaker 2 (15:43):
Yes, yes, absolutely so that that's one form of danger.

Speaker 1 (15:46):
Yeah, we can't. We can't not have some kind of pride.
And I think that's the whole point, is what you're saying,
the archetypes. It's almost like a type of propaganda of
our ourselves, of what it means to be human And
like a roundabout does that make any sense at all?
I'm my brain is kind of like clicking.

Speaker 2 (16:05):
I think this challenge is it's not the central question,
because there are many central questions in Homer, but it's
one of the great psychological ones, and it's one of
the ones that many GWAT veterans especially are facing today.
I have a friend, Adam Majors, who's a Union depth psychologist,
and he wrote a book called Odysseus in the Ore.

(16:26):
I've read about half of it.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
I haven't read the whole thing.

Speaker 2 (16:28):
But it's very good.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
I have heard of that book. I haven't read it.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
But and he I mean he's talking about more personal
issues largely, but many What many veterans I've talked to
have run into is this feeling disillusionments. It's basically Achilles
speech from Book nine. Why am I fighting for? These
men are the sons of atreus the only men who
love their wives. We are coming over here for their

(16:53):
honor and glory? And what do we get in return?
What's in it for us? Why are we doing this
for We're not going to win glory, They're not going
to honor us, right, Why are we doing this at all?
The danger of disillusionment is very, very powerful, and it's
not just with combat, it's with all kinds of things

(17:14):
we might value. One of the great sort of cultural
discussions going on is like marriage. I think we're coming
through that one. I think we're coming out the other
side of that. But for much of the late twenty teens,
people were banding about this fifty percent divorce rate statistic,
which to my knowledge, never actually came true. It was
based off of a projection from the eighties. We will

(17:36):
eventually get there.

Speaker 3 (17:37):
And then we never did.

Speaker 2 (17:38):
But you know, people were being very disillusioned with marriage,
People become disillusioned with war, People become disillusioned with their country,
People become disillusioned with their values and their cell themselves.
One of the interesting ones for me personally was the
value of the freedom of speech, which I dedicated much

(17:59):
of my life and attention to in my early twenties,
and it was very unnerving to discover that the meaning
of the freedom of speech as expressed in the First
Amendment was not actually what I had thought it was.
It was changed in nineteen nineteen by Justice Oliver Wendell
Holmes Junior, in a descent of the Abrams case, and

(18:19):
basically redefined the original meaning of the freedom of speech.
It was a very technical legal term that meant basically,
the government can punish.

Speaker 3 (18:27):
You for what you say.

Speaker 2 (18:28):
They can throw you in prison if you don't like,
if you say something they don't like, if you even
insult the uniform of the armed forces. That was one
of the things you could be imprison for. But they
couldn't stop you from saying it. They couldn't prevent, they
couldn't there was no prior restraint. They couldn't license your
speech to borrow from John Milton's language, and they also

(18:50):
couldn't compel speech those two things, which ironically is kind
of where we've gotten to.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
Now.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Whether you're allowed on the platform or not is like
a kind of lice and sting speech. You can't be punished,
but we can prevent you from saying. It's very smith
from the matrix right now that.

Speaker 3 (19:07):
If you don't have a mouth.

Speaker 1 (19:08):
Yeah, and now that I just saw something on what
was it like Instagram? But the social media has now
become I think, so powerful because even if even though
there are things that we don't that we don't like
about it, and there's a lot of things I don't
like about it, but we're kind of forced to use it.
You know, I don't have my podcast out there getting

(19:30):
to talk to people like you, you know, that are interested
in Homer and Greek mythology. I wouldn't even know you, right,
I wouldn't even have had a chance to write to
like meet you. So my world, on one hand is
very expanded, and but it's also at the same point.
If I say anything that the Internet got, you know,

(19:50):
that's that the platform gods think is not right you know,
you have a strike against.

Speaker 3 (19:55):
You trade offs.

Speaker 2 (19:57):
Yeah, so it's happened. We have to, I think, kind
of pay due respect to the powers that allow us
this speech. And that doesn't mean agreeing with them all
the time, certainly, yeah, but it does mean respecting the
sort of emergent hierarchy. To borrow another sort of iliatic theme,
but to sort of conclude the point about disillusionments and

(20:17):
freedom of speech. In my case, I had to deal
with this question, is this value that I had embraced
in my late teens early twenties actually complete fiction because
I was also running into some actual like it's not
that it wasn't the law, it was. There was really
good reasons why it wasn't the law, Like libel is
actually the hard case against freedom of speech. And what

(20:39):
I realized is that the freedom of speech, as soon
as you try to legally and very precisely capture this term,
it loses its life, It loses its vitality. It becomes
a dead thing that you can poke holes and find
problems with. But if you understand the ideal of the
freedom of speech not as something that is set in

(21:02):
stone and defined clearly, but as a directional ideal as
something we want to move in the direction of conversing
more frankly and more candidly and openly with each other
on important matters of civics and religion and politics and philosophy.
Then these legal problems and these threats to disillusionments become

(21:26):
really minor. Actually, we can in fact still move in
that direction while taking the problems in consideration and not
allow ourselves to be disillusioned by our first impression of
the ideal that initially captured our imagination and it struck
us as beautiful. And I think that's the journey from

(21:48):
the worldview of the hero to the worldview of the man.
That these realizations drew out of Homer for me, and
that I want to be able to provide to other people,
because there are entire to unities online that are just
wallowing in their own disillusionment. And it's very sad. And
it's not because they are bad people. It's not because

(22:09):
they are deficient in some you know, capacity of insight
that we lack. Because because every person who is above
a certain degree of intelligence will face that challenge of disillusionment.
Oh this thing you valued when you were young, it
was a lie it was just propaganda. It was not
what you thought it was. As Achilles discovers with heroism.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
And after he goes through all the everything that he
goes through, that was a that was very So. I
read the Odyssey first before I read the Iliad, so
I got I didn't understand why that would be kind
of so powerful or Achilles. But then when I read
the Iliad, I was I remembered that scene when he's

(22:52):
talking to Odysseus in the underworld, and I'm like, oh
my god, could you imagine, you know, just at the
end of that not that's not the end end of
your life. That's you're in the afterworld. You're in the
dead zone and you have regrets. And I'm like, oh my,
that's awful to be. You know. It flies in the
face of what people think that when you die and
it's going to be all this, you know, some sort

(23:14):
of a comforting place to be. I don't, you know,
I don't want to go too much into the religion,
but you know, it's just the idea in our western,
you know, religious world, that we're going to have this
beautiful afterlife. Achilles doesn't have that. Achilles has regret, who
wants to. That's like purgatory, right, a purgatory of continual regret.

(23:38):
Don't talk to me Odysseus about whatever you're talking to.
You're still alive, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:44):
Yeah, Chlora, I would rather be I like to translate
it as a slave to a slave. It's not actually
the right phrasing, but it's the essence of way you say,
I would rather be a slave to a slave among
the living than king of the dead, which Milton so
beautifully inverted in in Paradise Lost with with Satan saying
rather rain in hell than than serve in heaven. It's

(24:06):
it's it's an achilles inversion there.

Speaker 3 (24:10):
That he was borrowing.

Speaker 1 (24:11):
Yeah, I think, well, remember that movie Meet Joe Black.

Speaker 3 (24:15):
I have not seen that.

Speaker 1 (24:16):
Okay, so not to spoil it for you, but Brad
Pitt plays Death and so the one.

Speaker 2 (24:22):
Where he puts on a Jamaican accent for a moment. Yeah, okay,
I've seen that scene.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Yeah. Yeah, So but it's the he is Death and
he's a grim reaper and he doesn't he doesn't and
then he falls in love. He didn't mean to fall
in love, and so then he he has that that
epiphany that wait, a minute, maybe you know, maybe life
is more valuable than death. Maybe maybe there's something else,

(24:51):
And so he was gonna anyway, he was going to
take the girl with him, sort of like Haities and persephone.
I guess when I think about it, I never thought
about it that way before until now. But anyway, it's
an interesting take on you know, somebody that has a
lot of power and switching it up. My brain's thinking, again.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
You reserved yourself with religion. So I'll try not to
get too nerdy into philosophy, but I will say one
of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century was a
German Man named Martin Heidegger, and his interest was in
the question of being and one of the places he
arrived at and I won't do the full explanation, he's

(25:35):
quite a handful to get your figures around, but he
was very intrigued and arrived at this position of being
toward death. But the idea of death and the end
of things creates the sort of meaning and the sense
of time that we experience being through during our lives.
It's a very philosophical, nerdy and long winded way to

(25:57):
get to Brad Pitt's other speech in Troy, where he
says that we're, you know, the God's envy us because
we are mortal, and everything is more beautiful because we
are doomed. Not only is everything more beautiful, it is
like something to be because we are doomed. Death gives
not just meaning in a sort of Jordan Petersonian sense,

(26:18):
but in an experiential sense at all. There's an urgency
and a likeness to be something because there is an
end coming. Are you familiar with the show The Good Place?

Speaker 3 (26:30):
By chance?

Speaker 2 (26:31):
No, it's it's a very very nerdy Netflix TV show,
very funny in my wife and Mi's taste with Ted
Danson and I forget the wait.

Speaker 1 (26:42):
Is he like God or something? Is it there?

Speaker 3 (26:45):
This is what I cannot plot spoil.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
He is not God but like an angel sort of.
And I'll let people who are interested in the show
go further and figure out, okay, his true nature as
they go along. But these characters die and they find
themselves in the Good Place. But there are all these
challenges and the interactions between the good Place and the

(27:09):
bad place. They're not called heaven and Hell. There's called
the good place in the bad Place.

Speaker 1 (27:13):
So like purgatory, so it's.

Speaker 2 (27:15):
Sort of analogy. There is a purgatory like place, funnily enough,
occupied by precisely one woman. But there is a problem
in the good Place where people begin to go crazy,
They begin to lose their mind and become vapid because
there is no end, and some of these characters are

(27:38):
tasked with fixing the good Place. I'll plot spoil this
part because it's it's sort of the nice conclusion that
ties in here. But what the main protagonist, Cheetiatagonia, comes
up with is we need an end to the good Place,
and they create a door that you can walk through
into nothingness, and that creates meaning in the good Place.

(28:00):
That makes it valuable to learn how to be a
master carpenter. I'm going to learn all these skills I
wanted to know on Earth. I'm going to make those connections,
fix things with that person I had a disagreement with
and all that. But the end, or just the possibility
of an end, is what creates the meaning and the
escape from the inanity and nothingness of being without end.

(28:22):
There as a very thoughtful show, a very thoughtful little
bit that comes from Heideger, which perhaps comes from Homer
before Heidiger.

Speaker 1 (28:32):
That's interesting. I have to look at that. I have
to check it out. That makes me think of Thetis
and her relationship with Achilles, because as a mother and
a grandmother, I think about well, I don't think about it,
but just the idea of if I were to lose
a child or a grandchild that's out of the order

(28:55):
of what we would expect, and how traumatizing that would
be for parent. And Thetis knew that Achilles would choose war.
She knew she knew that he would choose a short life,
and she also knew that that meant for her eternal
grief because she's immortal, and I don't know, I don't
know of anything more torturous than to be in some

(29:17):
sort of perpetual grief forever with no end to speaking of.
When you said that in the good place, they they
needed an end date. So when you're immortal, there's no
end date.

Speaker 2 (29:29):
So yeah, it's it's fascinating, horrible. Yeah, it's so fascinating
to think about because many of the gods have children
that are involved in the Trojan war cycle. Zeus I
think has a son Sarpedon mm hmm, who I don't.
I don't think Sarpedon died.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
I'd have to go back and reread.

Speaker 1 (29:51):
I think Sarpraudon does die, he ultimately dies.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
I think what we see is him get injured but
managed to make it back. Doesn't kill him ultimately, I
think so.

Speaker 4 (30:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:02):
And like many of the gods have illegitimate children who
die in the war. And just as Achilles says, you
know why, you know, are the sons of Atreus the
only men who love their wives?

Speaker 3 (30:16):
You know?

Speaker 2 (30:16):
The gods could say, is Thetis the only god who
loves her child? And we get an argument sort of
like that from of all People's Calypso in the Odyssey.
It's like, all you other gods can have mortal lovers,
but when I do it, that's not okay, right, And
it's a The fact that Achilles is an object of

(30:38):
particular focus and attention sort of highlights this double standard
that can lead to malice. Is one of the points
that Greg Naj brings up in the Ancient Greek hero
is He I forget who he was quoting, but he said,
there is a there's an idea of evil that is
the sort of contagiousness of suffering. I've suffered so you

(31:01):
should too, so other people should.

Speaker 3 (31:03):
Suffer as I suffered.

Speaker 2 (31:05):
And one of the thing that makes the hero so
special the hero in the technical sense that we're talking
about that we received from Homer, is that he does
not pass on his suffering. He takes it into himself
or herself. Because heroes can be heroines as well, and
they die with that suffering on their own without passing

(31:25):
it on, and sometimes they take on other peoples as well.
The name Achilaos actually means like the suffering of the people.
Greg Nach breaks down that etymology in his book, and
the names are fascinating. Patrick Les is referred to as
a theropam, which is a sort of ritual substitute and
a body double, but it's also like a servant, and

(31:47):
he dies in place of Achilles. His death is a
foreshadowing of the death of Achilles, just as Goose's death
is sort of a reminder of Maverick of his own mortality.
And just a random etymological side this there upon word
is the root where we get therapy.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
From in the modern context.

Speaker 2 (32:05):
That is a that's a suffering of death that Achilles
experiences in advance, and his initial temptation is to I'm
going to make everyone else die, and that's what brings
him back. He's killing everybody. He takes twelve Trojan victims
and sacrifices them, and that doesn't fix things.

Speaker 1 (32:23):
It's it's when he turns berserker basically yes, the flesh
of his adversaries.

Speaker 2 (32:31):
He compares himself to the river.

Speaker 1 (32:33):
God had to come up and say, hey, quick, flooding
my banks with dead Yeah, but dead bodies and blood like,
you can stop now. And Achilles was still wanting to
fight the river. He was not. He was beyond consolation.

Speaker 2 (32:47):
He was, yes, But it's that it's at the very
end where he has that anagnorosis, that recognition of likeness,
and it's not even a likeness with Hector. What's fascinating
is when Priam confronts him yes, and says, look at me,
and think of your own father at home, who will
never see you again. It's that recognition that and ignoresis

(33:11):
that finally satiates that and allows him to like, allows
him to not.

Speaker 3 (33:16):
Pass that on any further.

Speaker 2 (33:18):
And he he sort of accepts his fate at that
point and says, I'm going to He already saved the Achaeans.
He already saved the Greeks from Hector, because Hector was
going to burn their ships. That's why he that's why
Patrick Clos initially came out and fought, and then he
basically saved the Greeks from the defeat as well. And
so that that's what makes him a savior, very very

(33:39):
literally in this case. But that that taking the suffering
of existence into yourself and not passing it on. I
heard I don't remember who said it, but it was
a It was a I think it was Joseph Campbell
actually who described Achilles taking up his shield, this beautiful
shield that Homer spends like two full pages disc the

(34:01):
works of hephaistis that describes the whole world essentially. It's
it's the ocean surrounding the land, and there's farmers in
the fields, and there's a city, two cities, one at
war and one at peace. And there's a the foreshadowing
of the first trial by jury that we see on
the shield, little foreshadowing to some other legal and philosophical

(34:21):
changes down the road. But it's the weight. It's this
very heavy shield Campbell describes that represents the pain and
the suffering of existence and life, not from one side
or the other side, but of both sides that he
picks up and carries like Atlas, and that's what's going
to protect him and what he's going to protect other

(34:43):
people with.

Speaker 1 (34:44):
And that's why I like Achilles. I feel like he
has a great burden that's beyond you know, Odysseus has
to get home. And Odysseus is very much my wife,
my son, my kingdom. He's not an Odysseu doesn't think
about the Greeks. So I read a paper doctor due Casey,

(35:07):
and her essay was on the mothering similes in the
Iliad where Achilles likens himself to a mother bird, and
he says, he says, I did a podcast on this.
If you I think it it's like mothering similes. There's
like you could go listen to it if you want to,
because I think he might be interested. Achilles says, I serve,

(35:30):
and he's talking about his mermidons. I serve them first,
like I make sure they're taking care of first before
I even put a morsel in my mouth, just like
a mother bird feeds the young first. So he has
a very much a mothering vibe with his mrmidons.

Speaker 2 (35:47):
You know, who also compared himself to Achilles and used
feminine mothering language describing his relationship with others. Socrates explicitly
compared himself to Achilles in the Apology, and he described
himself as a as a midwife two ideas. He is
the helped other people give birth to ideas. Just an

(36:11):
interesting connection, since you brought.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Up right, and I think that that's that Achilles is
carrying the burden genuinely for his men. And supposedly about
six thousand mermandons that Achilles had, that's way more than
Odysseus brought over. Odysseus brought over a tiny like twelve ships,

(36:32):
you know, like he didn't have that many men. He
was he was a very minor king, and Achilles was
just a prince. But he brought he brought half as
many as Agamemnon. So I think Agamemnon brought the most,
like twelve thousand or something. But Achilles was bearing the
burden of taking care of them, thinking about them. And

(36:55):
I thought, of course, I made the connection with Alexander,
because Alexander was known for knowing all his men, and
he would go to the sick tents and he would
talk to them and he knew them by name, and
that's why they followed him, because he was very intimate
with them. And I think Achilles was the same way.
I imagine Achilles walking through the ships and he could

(37:17):
call them all by name, and he would know their families,
he would know very intimate details about them. And I
don't see Odysseus having that same burden because he basically
sacrificed all his men to get home.

Speaker 2 (37:30):
Well, I mean he sacrificed them, is like, that's how
some people would say it.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
That's just that's very simplified.

Speaker 2 (37:40):
But yeah, what the opening of the Odyssey says is
he tried with all his might to save them, but
he could not save them. The reckless fools nepioi is
the word, their own recklessness.

Speaker 1 (37:52):
Kind of like Zeus with them destroyed them.

Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yes, I mean the Zeus complaint is what immediately follows
this opening passage of the we get this opening lines
saying this is what the story is about. Odysseus, who,
pertaining to this idea of the of the leader who
knows the people, many cities of men he saw and
came to know their minds like the superpower of Odysseus

(38:17):
is this Greek word knowles, which usually gets translated as mind,
but which Greg Nauj translates as mental connection. It's a
little bit more than just cognitive ability, although it does
connect with this idea of techne, this craft or skill,
or this capacity for stratagems. Those two things are connected,

(38:37):
but it begins with mental connection, with understanding other people.
And it's why Odysseus is persistently chosen as an envoy
to the gods in book one, to Agamemnon, to Achilles
and book nine. He's persistently chosen because he is so diplomatic,
and he's diplomatic because he knows the people, and it's

(38:59):
like it. It's that knowledge that allows Odysseus to distinguish
between what might be otherwise very similar sounding criticisms, like
if you listen to one of my not not favorite
the opposite of favorite but most interesting characters in the
Iliad is theirsitis their cities. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing that
because I learned the name before I started learning Greek.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
I hate when that happened.

Speaker 2 (39:22):
Yeah, it's terrible. I'll never not say it's supposed to
make in Latin, but it's.

Speaker 1 (39:29):
Yeah, no, it's like reading any fantasy book when you
just say that you identify what the word looks like spelled,
and then you hear an audiobook or the authors say it,
you're like, that is not even what I imagined, right, But if.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
You listen to Thersides, who is an interesting character for
a number of reasons, he's a very minor character. Of course,
in the Iliad he gets like two paragraphs, but his complaints,
when you look at them, are very similar to achilles complaints.
It complains about Agamemnon being a coward and not paying,
not duly honoring his best warriors, not honoring Achilles. Odysseus

(40:05):
respects Achilles, but he not just browbeats but actually backbeats.
And it's it has to do with the understanding the
difference in intention and in nature and also in rank
between these these characters, like thersites is trying to get
a laugh out of people, and he's basically trying to

(40:25):
undermine everybody. He is that voice of disillusionment that threatens
the heroic spirit. That's really what he is. And this
becomes much clearer in later writings from Shakespeare and Troilus
and Cressida, where he actually becomes a major figure, not
a minor figure, and he thersides in Troilus and Crestida
became something of a favorite character of all people. Karl Marx,

(40:51):
along with Mephistopheles from The Doctor Foulest to play. So yes,
so this character of disillusionment saying very similar things. But
it's Odysseus's ability to know the minds of these characters
and of the men that allows him to intervene correctly.
And I think you're right. I think Achilles does.

Speaker 3 (41:15):
Care about the men.

Speaker 2 (41:16):
He is this motherbird, at least to his own mermadots,
you know, and he's beloved and respected by them. But
Odysseus takes that to the next level. And when we
see him speak in the Odyssey, and he's always telling
different stories. He's a bit like Joker from Batman. He's
always got a different story for his stars, you know.
But he's not trying to scare people. He is changing

(41:38):
his story to be most appropriate for the audience. It's
his recognition of the nature of the audience that allows
him to speak correctly. And this is I think most
explicit in his interaction with Nalsica, where we actually hear
his own mental dialogue. He's like, should I approach her
and grasp pernees, which is a normal way to plead

(41:59):
for supplication, or should I like speak to her from
a distance for the sake of appropriateness. And it's like that,
that internal mental dialogue, which we also see in Achilles
in Book one of the Iliad, It's like, should I
draw my sword and kill him? Or should I not?
With Agamemnon, that's the that's his mind at work, gauging

(42:21):
the person, gauging the context, what is most appropriate here?
And whereas Athena intervenes in the case of Achilles, Odysseus doesn't.

Speaker 3 (42:29):
Seem to need that intervention.

Speaker 2 (42:30):
He's got that capacity on his own, which is one
of the reasons that Athena likes him so much. You think,
like I did.

Speaker 1 (42:38):
Basically, I think Achilles would have killed Agamemnon right then
and there. She grabs his hair and yanks him back
and says, not yet, not yet, Well.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
Can I can? I go on a very esoteric, tangent moment.
The book that brought my wife and I together was
a very strange book from the world of psychology called
The Breakdown of the Cameron Mind by Julian James The
Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the bi Cameral
Mind by Julian James, very esoteric title. The theory that

(43:08):
Jane's advances in this book, which is called by Richard
Dawkins either a work of complete insanity or the most
brilliant thing to be written in psychology, and nothing in between,
and no one can know for sure which it is.
But he argues that the parts of the brain that
are associated with language processing Brokers area and Ernicus area,

(43:30):
are on a separate hemisphere of the brain from the
parts that seem to be we think associated with language formation,
and there is some evidence to believe that the corpus colosum,
the bridge between the two hemispheres, is not It is
more developed now than it once was for human beings.

(43:51):
And the way this appears to have worked out was
that before that bridge was fully built in our development
as humans, or was prevented from being developed by violence
and trauma and other sorts of things, was that we
experienced certain instances of our own internal mental dialogue as
external audio hallucinations. The short and dirty memish explanation is

(44:17):
we were all schizophrenic people walking around hearing voices that
were really our own thoughts, but we would experience them
as the voices of spirits or perhaps gods. And Julian
James cites the Iliad in particular as literary evidence for
this phenomenon. So there is no reason anyone should believe

(44:39):
this or disbelieve it. It's not exactly a falsifiable theory.
It's more just speculative. But it's an interesting sort of
scientific or quasi scientific way of understanding that that conversation
with Athena that Achilles has in.

Speaker 1 (44:54):
Book onek so that Odysseus was a little more advanced
in his brain that he was, that he could have
that internal dialogue. He could stop himself for some reason.

Speaker 2 (45:04):
I don't that more advanced If he couldn't stop himself
in some cases he knew in advance that he wouldn't
be able to, and so he could tell his commerce
to tie him to the mast. Was there some foresight?
That's some force out there.

Speaker 1 (45:18):
Yeah, and then y'all put some beeswax and cotton in
your ears and have gotten But yeah, that's interesting. I
like that. Okay, let's talk a little bit about the
difference between the hero and the man. And you have
those capitalized like archetypes. You spoke on the hero as
being young and being initiated as adolescents, and that was

(45:42):
a connection that I made with Achilles because he was young.
HE'SI It has him at about fifteen, and he's already
a father and he has to make the choice. And
I don't I don't think a lot of people think
about Achilles as a young father. But he knows Neoptolomus,
and he's married to Diadamia, you know, and basically young

(46:04):
teenage parents and you know, yes, it's a long time
ago when people may have gotten married younger, but he's
still young enough not to understand what he was getting
himself into the idea of war, the idea of glory.
That was something that was perpetuated in stories that he
would have heard from his father, from Chirn. And so

(46:26):
he's going to choose war. And I wrote a scene
where he's holding his son, and I had that. That's
why I told you about the art that I had
commissioned by Red Murphy. Was powful, and he's contemplating it
was harder to leave than he thought he but he
still was but he was still moving forward. With the decision,

(46:47):
and in that moment when he's looking at his son,
he realizes that his father's going to lose a son,
that his son's not going to have a father, his
wife is going to be a widow, and that his
mother's going to grieve for and yet he still makes
the choice.

Speaker 2 (47:02):
Yeah, that sort of puts an additional layer on one
of the most underrated scenes, perhaps in the Iliad, which
is the very sort of beginning of book nine, where
the embassy is first arriving at Achilles tent to try
to persuade him to come back. They catch him sitting
down and playing a liar singing of heroes of times

(47:23):
before old, heroes in the past, as Patricles is waiting
for him. The heroes of the past is actually the
meaning of the name of Patrocles, pater Cleios, the glory
of the fathers, but something that's what was his name
from Scranton University. It'll come to me later. I need
more coffee. But it was pointed out that the liar

(47:44):
he's playing on is this silver leaved liar that belonged
to the father of Androma Kee, who's who he killed
along with Androma Key's seven brothers, And so there's this
very poignant thing as he is sitting there contemplating his
own plight as he's singing these songs, and he's probably

(48:04):
thinking about his own wife and child at home and
how much he misses them, and he's contemplating leaving because
he's withdrawn from the conflict. He's mad at Agamennon. He's like,
this is stupid. I'm I'm going to go home. He's
saying it directly as as a foregone conclusion as he's
playing this song on the liar belonged to a man
he killed and who denied his homegoing. And this is

(48:26):
not like a moral condemnation. It's sort of just just
an illustration of this interwoven web of death that all
these characters find themselves in Achilles most of all. You know,
people might look at this and be like, oh, how
ironic or hypocritical. Even it's like, no, no, no, he didn't
choose this exactly. I mean he did, but he didn't.

(48:47):
He didn't know what he was getting into. He could
not have known what he was getting.

Speaker 1 (48:52):
Right, he had no idea. He'd never been to war before.

Speaker 2 (48:55):
I will invoke Heidegger again. Heideger has this, has this
I would say beautiful, but it's not. It's actually very
clunky word, this word goevorphinhite, which means that this quality
of flungness or thrownness, we are thrown into existence without consent,
without understanding. We find ourselves here and saying, well, it's

(49:17):
not fair, this feels unjust is no is no like
excuse that doesn't get you anywhere. And he actually considers
this to be inauthentic, and he sort of brought this
idea of authenticity into modern therapeutic conversations, although most people
misunderstand it. Authenticity comes from also Greek alto hentes, like

(49:40):
to move oneself or to be an actor on oneself,
and it requires accepting the flungness of being the existence
you find yourself in. Maybe there's death around you, maybe
you cause some of this even and still acting, still
choosing to act, and not being trou in some sense

(50:01):
of like not being allowed to learn or do otherwise
because once you did something else. But but just that
scene of him playing the liar of the man he
killed as he sings songs of heroes who died in
the past while contemplating going home, it's it's a very
complex layered scene that we experienced for just a moment
of these characters walk in too, and I.

Speaker 1 (50:21):
See that Achilles, that they take their suffering with them,
but there there's a rashness to their actions because they're young,
like Achilles, and so they cause suffering in those decisions,
like his death brought great suffering to his mother, to
those around him, and you know, killed and to the
people he killed, all of that. And I think that

(50:44):
what he did and that visited upon Neoptoleomus, that everything
that he did, that his son inherited that because Odysseus,
the you know, with the silver tongue that Odysseus has,
I I see the Agamemnon kind of weaponizes Odysseus a
little bit.

Speaker 2 (51:04):
He'd be a dumb commander not.

Speaker 1 (51:06):
To right, so he does. But Odysseus is also a
young man, you know, he's not much older than Achilles.
He's young. And I don't know any stories of Odysseus
having gone to war prior to going to Troy, you know,
other maybe you know, protecting Ithaca from some raiders and

(51:26):
some things like that, but I don't think he's been
to I don't think he knew what he was getting
into either, other than he didn't want to go.

Speaker 2 (51:33):
I think his initiatory moment of violence was.

Speaker 3 (51:37):
The boar hunt.

Speaker 2 (51:38):
Yes, there's this funny scene in the beginning of the
in the fallout between Achilles and Agamemnon. You have Nestor
jump in and intervene. I love I do too. His
name is actually fascinating too. But he gives the classic
old man speech that are you your kids are nothing

(51:58):
like the warriors of mad genery. You know. He comes
in and he's like, you are far inferior to men
I fought alongside so and then he lists some names,
and the names he lists are men's men who participated
in the Great Caledonian boar Hunt that was like the
great event of the generation before the Trojan war cycle.
So boar hunts have kind of a reputation for like

(52:22):
making men out of boys and being these these initiatory
moments of extremely dangerous yes and so wild. Something I
learned just a few months ago is that something about
bores and pigs is a feature of their circulatory system
allows them to have full strength even when they've mostly
bled out, so their muscles working is not contingent on

(52:46):
blood supply in quite the same way that it is
with humans. So they would like run up spears and
like mall people and gore them with their tusks, which
is why the Great Boar Spears had these big blocks
on the front.

Speaker 1 (52:59):
That's crazy.

Speaker 2 (53:02):
So so Odysseus is recognized by you're a klia by
the scar on his leg from from the boar tusk.
So he's demonstrated himself, not in war, but in this,
in this hunt for a very dangerous animal.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
So m those were all his uncles he went. He
was visiting his mother's parents, mm hmm. And that, and
it was his uncles that were that were with him
on that boar hunt, and he ran, and Odysseus ran
in front of all of them like young men do,

(53:36):
like Alexander did, like Achilles did, because they have something, Yes,
they have something to prove, you know, they're they're trying
to show the veterans, look what I can do. I'm
just like you. And the veterans like slow down, slow down,
but they don't because they're.

Speaker 2 (53:54):
Young and to moderate the young men.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
Yes, and and I think Odysseus and Achilles, maybe Odysseus
is a little bit older, but he's still young and
relatively untested. And I see Menilaeus and Agamemnon, to use
your archetype in your book that you talk about, they're
on the man's side. They're not the young, They're not
they're not so young. Agamemnon has already killed. He killed

(54:18):
Clademnestra's first husband, he killed her child, he created a coup.
He already he basically he went to war for my cni.
He knows what's he knows what's up.

Speaker 2 (54:29):
The House of Atreus is a fascinating little rabbit hole
of his own. Oh, I know, I have the extraordinary
accomplishment of Menelaus to end that curse. Was he probably
could have continued if he if he'd killed his wife Helen.
Was she here? She almost did.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
I don't know how. I didn't know this, but I
came to Dune late in the game, and yeah, I
haven't read the book. I haven't read any of the
books I know, but I was like, oh, my god,
that's that's the House of Atreus. Wait a minute, they're
all cursed. No, this is to go sideways. But you
can't get away from the Iliot in the Odyssey or
Homer in my opinion, and you gave me a good one.

(55:07):
Top Gun. Again, what differentiates the hero from the man.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
So the hero, the fundamental motivation of the hero is glory.
It is this is this competitive aspiration for status and
valor and showing oneself and this is often righteous indignation.
This is also often competition. I'm gonna make ten million dollars,
I'm gonna go fight, I'm gonna be a Navy seal,

(55:33):
I'm gonna go do something great, and I'm going to.

Speaker 3 (55:36):
Be better than everybody else.

Speaker 2 (55:38):
That's the that's the heroic impulse. Maybe the best demonstration
of this in film, even better than Top Gun, is
the film Whiplash.

Speaker 3 (55:47):
Have you seen this? No?

Speaker 1 (55:49):
I haven't.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Okay. It's about a jazz drummer, a student who's going
to become a jazz drummer, and he has a particularly
nasty and vicious, perfectionist, psychopathic instructor. Perhaps you've seen the
clips the clips, and isn't quite my tempo?

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Isn't the drummer in Top Gun? The Mavericks like the
new Maverick.

Speaker 2 (56:15):
I haven't seen the New Maverick. I haven't seen the
new top Gun. He might be, but I think I
think's son very possibly. I have to watch it. Yeah,
I haven't seen it. I've heard nothing but good things
about Top Gun too, so I will have to look
at that. But in Whiplash, you basically have a kid
who is pursuing perfection and an instructor who wants to

(56:38):
create perfection, and he's willing to damage and scare away
all the students except the one that he will raise
to perfection. And this, you know, reaches a tragic end
in the Greek sense, where like the kid gets kicked
out of school and the teacher gets kicked out of
the program, and they both have no future with the school,

(56:59):
and they run into each other at the bar, and
the teacher they speak amicably and they're like, it's like,
on the other side of destroying each other's lives, they
can be like friends almost or not friends, but at
least they understand each other, you know. And the teacher
reveals he's like, I'm not actually like about being mean
or something. I just love this thing and I know

(57:21):
what it takes for the greatest and I wanted it
would be worth it for Jazz to create just the
one and that was what the student wanted to be,
and I will this one. I don't feel bad plot
spoiling because understanding what's going on is far beyond just
the events of the plot. But the instructor is running
a band for some show somewhere on the side. You know,

(57:42):
it's not his teaching, it's just him continuing to do
his thing. And this old student shows up and takes
the drumming spot, and he, the teacher, in front of
the entire audience, humiliates the student. He sets up a
different song the student wasn't prepared for, and he explains
that he knew it was the student that got him fired,

(58:03):
and he exposes him and embarrasses him in front of everybody.
But the student doesn't care. He just starts playing, and
he starts playing the solo to a particularly difficult song,
and the teacher realizes it's perfect, and he comes in
and he conducts him through this perfect drum performance and
it's just them, and the camera zooms in. The audience

(58:26):
kind of disappears in the focus, and it's a moment
of perfection, and then it ends cuts to credit and
people often interpret that as like an illustration of the
pathology of the pursuit of perfection and it's like, no,
it's about that moment. If you're thinking about the future
beyond that, you're missing the immortality of the moment, the

(58:46):
greatness of the moment, whether that's.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
Chrismas flow, isn't that kind of like the flow?

Speaker 2 (58:52):
We could call it flow. We could also call it
one's aristea, their moment of greatness, their moment of glory.
That's Patrick cliss fight against Apollo or diabetes flying against
the gods. It's your moment of greatness that immortalizes you.
And it doesn't matter what happens after that. You could
die after that. You achieved immortality in that moment. And

(59:12):
that's what the hero is pursuing. That's what he's after.
He's after that moment, that aristea that brings him up,
maybe even to the status of a god, like it
did with Hercules or Heracles. The way Gregnaj explains this,
as he does everything so beautifully, is with the etymology
of the word hero itself. Turns out, hero is related

(59:33):
to our word hour by the root horror, which is
like season or time, and Hera is the goddess of
the seasons and of cows and other things. But it's
that seasonality and what Gregnad says is that the hero
is unseasonal until their moment of need, until they're Aristea.
In that moment, they are seasonal, and that is the

(59:55):
hour of their death. Because what is more glorious, what
is more memorable, what is greater than dying in the
performance of your greatest act? And that's what drives the hero.
Hercules actually means the glory of hera Harah clays, and
so that's what the hero is after. They're after that
immortal moment, the immortalizing moment that will bring them into history. Right.

(01:00:19):
History is a prelude to some Hegelian ideas that this
ties into where the man comes in and is and
sort of replaces the hero in mentality, is that he
sees a certain naivete, a certain uninformedness in the aspiration
of the hero. And this is rooted in the nature
of language itself and.

Speaker 3 (01:00:40):
The power of language to immortalize.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
It's not like, what do we actually know of the
real person, Achilles, And this is I think what makes
your work in mythological fiction so fascinating, because it sort
of illustrates how little we know of these characters from
the original text themselves. How well, did these stories act
immortalize the characters? What do we really know of Odysseus

(01:01:04):
and Achilles. One of the most fascinating questions that comes
up pertaining to Odysseus is like he lies a lot, right,
He's always telling these other stories. And what makes that
so interesting is that it undercuts the necessary mechanism of
heroic immortalization. When Achilles says more hateful to me is

(01:01:24):
the man who hides one thing away in his heart
and utters another, He's not just expressing an aesthetic taste.
He's expressing a disgust for the thing that threatens the
vehicle of immortalization. Because if all these stories are just
propaganda or tall tales that some wily old sailor pirate
from Ithaca made up, then no one will take a

(01:01:45):
story of a hero for what it is to the hero.
It'll just be some story. And so there are some
people who say that Odysseus is a hero because his nostos,
the song of his homecoming, also immortalizes him. But does
it really, Like, how certain are we of the truthfulness
and the historicity of the events that happened there? Maybe not.

(01:02:09):
Maybe Odysseus himself has undermined that, like Hermes stealing the
calves with the brooms tied to the tails, he's swept
the trail behind him and disappeared into sailor stories about
cyclopses and sirens and goddesses and sea storms and so forth.
And maybe that's part of it, because the one thing

(01:02:30):
that caused his journey to be such a travesty and
such a challenge, there's a detour man gets lost going
home is his moment of weakness on the island of
the Cyclops. They've escaped, and the cyclops the name of
the cyclops is Polyphemus, which means many stories. He's a
larger than life, great man who eats men, and he's

(01:02:50):
got one eye singular focus. He is the symbolic embodiment
of the hero and what heroism does to men devours
them and bashes their skulls on the ground. That's what
happened to Achilles. He almost escapes, but he has this
heroic instinct for recognition. Know that i Odysseus of Ithaca
was the one who put your eye.

Speaker 1 (01:03:09):
Out, and that's what allows dress.

Speaker 2 (01:03:14):
Polyphemus to call upon the odd Poseidon and curse him
and delay his homecoming a little bit. Now, he didn't
kill the Cyclops, so Poseidon doesn't kill him, So he's
got that. But it was it was the heroic instinct.

Speaker 3 (01:03:26):
It was the need to at.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Least be partially remembered that got him into all this trouble.
But he did call himself otis no man, which is
the which is the the ultimate act of anti heroism.
I am rejecting this desire to immortalize my name. I'm
willing to give up even my name, as well as
my clothes and my ship, and my identity and my

(01:03:50):
youthful appearance and everything else in order to get home.

Speaker 1 (01:03:52):
I see Odysseus says, suffering from PTSD. I don't think
a disease can't I don't think he can go home.
He recognizes that after the Secones, he is the war.
He's bringing violence with him. He doesn't know that's ten
tours of duty, that's ten years of being at war
that will affect you.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
This is what Adam Major's focus did on. And I
actually have a friend who's an Air Force PJ. They're
like seals have a high attrition rate. Air Force pjs
have the highest. They're like the most intense. He's a
very very high tier guy. And he said that reading
the Odyssey was crucially important for him in coming home.
And now he's married as a successful marriage with beautiful daughter,

(01:04:37):
which is like very rare for Spekovs guys to have
a successful marriage like that. He says, the thing about
Odysseus is he has to shed all the aspects of
his warrior identity in order to come home. He wasn't
ready to come home before. But it was the transformation
of mental connection that allowed him to shape shift in

(01:04:58):
a way to cease to be Odysseus, the great leader
of Troy, while still maintaining some of the skills the techne.
But he's a man of twists and turns right the
pauluthropone very wily man who can change himself in order
to be what is necessary for the circumstance, and that's
what allows him to come home.

Speaker 1 (01:05:19):
He's when I had talked when I said earlier about
Neotolomus so Achilles. Violence is visited basically upon Neotolomus, and
in the sources that Neotolomus is even more ruthless than
his father. He's more frightening and he's even younger, So Neotolomus,
Odysseus has to go get By this point, Odysseus is

(01:05:42):
a veteran. He has to go get this young boy,
this young man, to join the war. Neotomus doesn't have
to go, but what draws him is what his father did.
And I would imagine that Neotolomus had heard stories of
his father over ten years. There's going to be bards
traveling around, so he's going to know his father through stories.

(01:06:04):
What does his son want to do? A son wants
to in some way emulate his father, But how do
you how do you emulate Achilles?

Speaker 3 (01:06:13):
What do you write?

Speaker 1 (01:06:14):
That's a very large shadow, and that as a boy,
you're going to have to come out from under that shadow?
And how are you going to make a name for
yourself alongside Achilles other than to best Achilles. So he goes,
and it's because of him. He's one of the reasons
why the Greeks then win the war. They had to

(01:06:35):
have Theotolomus. And then because I know you're thinking about stuff,
and I see Odysseus as a violent man, because the
first thing he does when he comes home is he
has to kill all the suitors, which I guess you get. Okay,
that's just justifiable. He's gotta like have a little mini
war right there in the hall. But then he kills
all the women, kills all the maids.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
Well, he kills twelve of them specifically, Yes.

Speaker 1 (01:06:58):
Right, but it's still violence. He's still resorting to violence
to and his Telemachus is a young man. So when
his father's homecoming, is his father initiating him into manhood
through violence?

Speaker 2 (01:07:12):
Well, so kind of that, That is what interpretation is
a very common one there. There have been a few,
a few books about it, like The Silence of the
Maids is a novel account. I haven't read it, but
I haven't Emily Emily Wilson dwells upon this a lot
in her lectures.

Speaker 3 (01:07:29):
About the Odyssey.

Speaker 2 (01:07:30):
I what we hear from the seer Tyresius is that
this is going to be, this is this has to happen.
The suitors themselves are told multiple times by seers, even
even in like the hours before it's about to happen,
like you guys are in for But they, like Odysseus's comrades,
these nepioi, these reckless. One of the connotations of Nepioi

(01:07:53):
is like almost like children. Yeah, they don't have the
capacity to recognize gods when they're and they don't have
they don't even have the capacity to recognize Odysseus is
they don't have a capacity. They cannot recognize the true,
the true nature of their circumstances.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
And they're all young, because all all of the war
aged men left with Odysseus, and they're all gone.

Speaker 2 (01:08:20):
To your point, Odysseus and Neoptolemus. One of the interesting
things Gregnauge illustrates is that the significance of the meanings
of these names, like Achilles' name is meaningful, Patrick Lee's
name is meaningful. Odysseus also means like the hated one.
We think there's a chance Odysseus is not a Greek name.
It might be some some other root language that got

(01:08:41):
adopted and became something else. Nestor's name very important, very interesting.
Neo Ptolemeus I just had to look up. Now it
comes from Neo that knew. And Polemus is like a
new warrior, a new fighter. So it is Achilles who
is like making who perpetuates the war role across the generations.

(01:09:02):
What does Telemachus's name mean means far from battle Telemachus.
So Odysseus is coming home, he does need to commit
a final act of violence to defend his home from
its invaders. You know, he's come home, Yeah, from these
invaders and the people who were supporting and helping the invaders.

(01:09:22):
He didn't kill all of the maid servants. He killed
twelve specifically that his made Euraklia said, these are the
ones that were helping them. So here's here's the woman
who's telling him which other women to kill. So this
is lest this be taken as a like patriarchy thing.
It's like, well, you're a clia and as is trying
to chet and I.

Speaker 1 (01:09:43):
And you could and you can see and.

Speaker 2 (01:09:45):
What about the one hundred and eight suitors?

Speaker 1 (01:09:47):
Yeah no, and what I and what I was getting
at too, with the suitors being young men, they were
like that young Achilles. They were they haven't had any
male men like the arc type that you talk about.
They haven't been guided by the man, so they're they're
sort of I guess they might have grandfathers around, but

(01:10:09):
they're probably a little bit reckless.

Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
Antinous's father gets into a fight with Larties at the
end and Larties puts a spear through his head. I
thought that was a very which.

Speaker 1 (01:10:20):
Which would make antinous father too old to go to war. Yes,
so that's what I mean, is that the generation of
men that would have that. I don't know what the
age would have been. I would imagine sixteen seventeen would
have been old enough, you know.

Speaker 2 (01:10:36):
Yeah. But it's interesting because the Ascylus's play Agamemnon begins
with these old men complaining about all the youth being away,
and there's just these old men floating through the streets
like the results of We don't really know what happens
in the home of the Mermidons and of Achilles, but

(01:10:56):
in Ithaca it concludes with Athena coming down and putting
this blood feud.

Speaker 3 (01:11:01):
To an end.

Speaker 2 (01:11:02):
There will be peace here where we're not doing this again.
So it is established, and it's a bit of a
diosex mac Now it's a little bit odd, but we
see a more fully fleshed out version of that in
the end of the Oristea on the Mycenian side, with
the House of Atreus and how that goes down. The
question of bringing violence home is an interesting one because
it sort of treats Odysseus as with you know, some

(01:11:25):
people like to say Odysseus was the cause of his
comrade's death when they were the ones who ate the
cattle of the sun. That was the great challenge. You know.
In the opening lines, the important informative summarizing lines, the
cyclops is not mentioned. The Lastrigonians are not mentioned. A
Kriptis and Cilla are not mentioned. The only challenge that

(01:11:45):
is mentioned, not the lotus eaters or cerce or any
of that, is the cattle of the sun. That's the test.
Can they That's the most important one. And his comrades
disobeyed him and ate the cattle of the sun. Therefore
the sun god wiped away the day of their return.
Odysseus contra Emily Wilson, saying, you know, this is about responsibility,

(01:12:05):
and the responsibility of Odysseus for his men. It's actually
about personal responsibility in that moment and in the same way,
to borrow that maybe the most popular and well known
adaptation of the Odyssey, I mean the Lion King by
way of Hamlet kind of like to say, to say,
like Simba brought violence back with him from like the

(01:12:25):
world of Timon and Pumba is sort of to set
aside the role that the hyenas and the scar had
in the situation that pride Rock was in, and the
situation was these suitors were trying to take Penelope and
kill Telemachus. They actually went out and tried to ambush him,
but he was able to get.

Speaker 1 (01:12:43):
Back and helped out, Yes.

Speaker 2 (01:12:46):
Very much. So help So to see this as Odysseus
bring violence back, it is true because there is a
certain violence that is always there in the presence of
true proper authority. It's that opening word menace, that's Leonard
Mulner talks is it's an extraordinary book. It's very very

(01:13:08):
knocked it back. I'll fix that later. Is like, there
are consequences for violations of the correct hierarchy. And what's
tragic about menace and is what made it a taboo
word to invoke and Homer just comes out the gate
with that, is that it has it has consequences that
extend beyond the the huboristic actor. It has indiscriminate consequences

(01:13:32):
that extend collaterally around And so Dissey is coming back?
Is the is the lion coming home? You know, it's
it's and he's going to set his house in order,
because that's what the good king has to do. The
good king does have to exert violence, and violence is
not a what's bad and evil is not actually violence.

(01:13:53):
That's how order is maintained. What's evil is hubris, it
is excess. It's what's going to be and what Gregnag argues,
and I think there's there might be something to this
is in the in the killing of the twelve serving girls,
Odysseus might have gone too far. He might have brought
in some what he calls heroic pollution. And there is

(01:14:15):
a there's a an author out of Brandeis University named
Joel Christensen who argues for what he calls heroic toxicity,
and that's the idea that heroism is actually bad and
that there is a heroic story that seems to be
the final heroic story and the end of heroism as such,
and we're in a way better off without it because

(01:14:38):
of the toxicity that heroism brings to it. I think
that that itself goes too far. I think Gregnag is
correct that heroes do have a dark side m H.
And they do hurt people. Hercules killed his whole family, terrible,
terrible thing. He had to do a lot of things
to compensate for that. And the compensation is only compensation.

(01:14:59):
It's not making things. It doesn't undo the harm. It
just kind of restores a balance, It restores, it restores
an order to things. So do heroes overstep sometimes? Yes.
Most of the heroes we see in these tales are
not just imperfect, but have quite great flaws, you know,

(01:15:20):
And that's a part of their personality. It's a part
of their extremity. It's a part of what makes them memorable,
is they take things to extremes.

Speaker 1 (01:15:27):
I see the violence that he brings home as I
just read this article post deployment syndrome, and so I
see that the way that he is handling himself when
he comes home. It would be a disservice to the
character just to say that there's not some sort of
trauma that he is bringing with him. And when you

(01:15:50):
go past the odyssey, he leaves and he goes to
war again, he marries another queen, has another son, So
the audience he is not really the end of his story.
So I look at he was so focused on getting
home and Penelope. What is it that would make him
leave again. I think that the war his experience was

(01:16:12):
sitting with him still and he might have you know,
I don't he may and he made to Lemchus kill
the maids. He didn't do it well.

Speaker 2 (01:16:20):
There is an interesting speculative fiction story written by the
excellent Nikos Cousinsakus called the Odyssey a modern sequel, which
annoyed a lot of people. But I mean, if anyone
could do it, it would be Nicos. In that story, Odysseus
gets restless and he has to go on another adventure,
and he goes with Helen of all people, and they

(01:16:40):
go off and do things he like, starts a pseudo
Buddhist kind of new religion and other things. But we
can speculate on that. Much of the conversation about trauma
that we discussed today comes from an author by the
name of Besil vander Kalck and Besil vander Kalk who
wrote this book called The Body Keeps the Score defines

(01:17:04):
trauma as basically any situation where we feel overwhelmed, where
we cannot where we can't handle things. That's trauma. We
see exactly one incident of that in the Odyssey with
Odysseus and it's a strange incident because it's where he
almost drowns, and the depiction which is dwelt upon in

(01:17:25):
Nicholson's book Why Homer Matters so at great length. He
has very strong opinions about the right way to translate
this is it. There's a moment where Odysseus is washed
up on the shore and it says his heart was
drowned or conquered. People try all kinds of translations for
this word. The root of this word for completely overtaken,

(01:17:46):
overcome by the sea. His heart, his friend is was
completely overcome and the root of the word almost I
don't remember the exact Greek word, but it's the same
route we get for domesticate and dominate, And so it's
like we get this sense of him being dominated and
completely over overcome by the sea in that moment. That's

(01:18:07):
the one time that Odysseus is truly overwhelmed. He's actually
made it to shore. He's alive, but he's he's done right.
But in almost every other case he has some trick
up his sleeve. He can think of something, he can
apply his techne, he can apply his nulls to come
up with some solution. He's never he's in no other

(01:18:27):
case is he overwhelmed by these challenges. He'll he'll, he'll
draw his sword in the face of Scylla. You know,
he'll come up with a stratagem to get the Cyclops drunk. He'll, he'll,
he can come up with something. We'll make a giant
wooden horse to deal with this seas that's gonna kill
us all if we don't do something. The first lecture
I remember, this was before I even read Greg Naje

(01:18:48):
that got me into thinking about the Iliad and Homer
in general more seriously, was a I wonder if I
can find it. I won't look for it right now,
but it was a lecture at Harvard I believe about
the Iliad and PTSD. And there is a scene in
the Iliod in which Achilles, after he's already sacrificed the

(01:19:09):
twelve Trojans, which is an odd sort of foreshadowing of
the Twelve Maids strangely enough, but that doesn't help him.
He's still crying on the beach thinking about and Patrick
Lee's ghost comes to him and speaks to him, and
this speaker interpreted this as a PTSD experience. PTSD is

(01:19:29):
not just like I'm kind of sad. PTSD is like
it was like real dysfunction, And what we see in
Achilles in his is in his inability to function here
he's still so overcome with rage and anger. Like that
is something closer to what we might associate with PTSD today.

(01:19:51):
And what the what the speaker was saying is that
what our modern veterans are not doing properly and are
not really being helped in doing, is not just decompression.
It's proper grief. It's proper grief. And what he points
out is what actually fixes Achilles and helps him is
not set more blood, it's not killing more Trojans, but

(01:20:13):
it's sitting there with Priam and facing their loss together.

Speaker 3 (01:20:18):
That's what fixes it.

Speaker 2 (01:20:19):
And he gets him through to the other side and
then he's able to do you know, he's his conflict
with Agammon is over too, Like everything is, it's not
better because like what is accomplished, We're still in the siege.
Hector's dead, Patrick Cliss is dead, but we're still here.
The city is still up. We haven't moved an inch,

(01:20:40):
but we've gotten through this. We've gotten through this. Maybe
trauma is the right word in this case, it can
be overused sometimes, but here it's pretty traumatic. With Odysseus,
the trauma I think is actually being experienced by Itha
cut itself like pride Rock is like the the trees

(01:21:01):
aren't growing, you know, it's being overrun. Things are out
of order, and the restoration of the balance does require
getting rid of these people. It would have been better
if the bird Seer had been had successfully persuaded them
to leave, but they really.

Speaker 3 (01:21:17):
Decided against it.

Speaker 2 (01:21:18):
And indeed, like my recollection, I'll have to go back
and reread it because new things pop out every time.
But I think my last read through of the Odyssey,
it really jumped out at me the way that like
Odysseus was trying to persuade them to leave, he was
trying to like arrange things such that he could just
like win things and it would be good. But Athena

(01:21:40):
wanted them to die, and Athena like set things up
so that they wouldn't change their mind and gave them
false hope so that they would fall. What that means
is up for you know, anyone's guests. You know, it's
kind of like like you know, God hardening Ramsey's heart
in the Bible. But it it goes back to that
point of response ability at the personal level that we

(01:22:02):
hear from Zeus in the Odyssey. It's like, it's really,
it's really the suitors who brought this on themselves, as
as Odysseus's companions did when they ate the cattle of
the Sun.

Speaker 1 (01:22:14):
I didn't I didn't give in my storyline. I didn't
give Odysseus and Penelope the easy reconnection because twenty twenty
years is a long time. I grew up in I
grew up in a military family, so I know firsthand
how families move on. And it's very difficult when a

(01:22:35):
soldier comes back and they've been gone for months, you know,
and they for when they leave, they put family on pause,
but the family keeps play. The family doesn't pause. It's
very very difficult. And so I think that after twenty years,
you know, it would have been not so easy.

Speaker 2 (01:22:53):
I think for most normal people it absolutely would be.
It is, and like I've met people who I have
friends who had long periods of separation that did not
reconvene neatly. But Odysseus, and this goes back to this
word nos and Odysseus's superpower of his mental not just mind,

(01:23:14):
but mental connection. As Greg Nader says, it's not just
coming to know the minds of all these other people,
but the mental connection he has with home. Most of
the challenges that he and his men face in the
Odyssey are challenges of forgetfulness. The lotus eaters Calypso Sir, say,
they're all invitations to forget home become immortal, with Calypso

(01:23:36):
on her island, who is supposedly far more beautiful than Penelope.
But it's his it's his attachment to home that allows
him to return home and to not forget it, and
allows him to push through these things. And the Odyssey
is bookended in this very beautiful way with these two transformations.
And by transformation, I mean a physical transformation that other

(01:23:59):
characters notice. In Book one, Telemachus is met by Athena
disguised his mentor, and she tells him basically, she reminds
him of his father and puts his father's spirit into him.
And then when he comes back into the hall and
starts speaking to his mother into the suitors, everyone is
taken aback and surprised with this new man that they

(01:24:21):
almost don't recognize in his personality and his tone and
has tact in his speech, and it is him being
filled with connection with his father transforms him. And then
at the very end we see Odysseus meets with his
father Larties, and they reconnect. And then Larties, who's this

(01:24:41):
describes as this old man dressed in rags. He looks
like a beggar, barely surviving, spiritually dead, you know, from
grief over the fate of his son and his house
and his world. His son has come home. They meet
again and he takes a bath, and he comes out
of his bath after having reconnected with his son, and

(01:25:01):
his son almost doesn't recognize him. He's now tan and strong,
he seems taller, he seems healthier. There's a physical transformation
that happens on the other side of this connection with
his son. And so this familiar, this mental connection is
not just with other people in gaining knowledge of them,
it also allows him to return home and to bestow

(01:25:22):
some of this power on other people too. And one
of the beautiful things about Penelope in all the descriptions
of hers, she's so well matched for her husband. She's
so cunning in her own way and crafty, and she
is still also mentally connected to Odysseus too, which is
so beautifully illustrated with this bed. Is it a larger

(01:25:43):
than life, an unrealistic depiction of how deeply connected a
couple can be, probably probably just as just as achilles
prowess in battle is probably an unrealistic expectation of the
capabilities of warriors against overwhelming odds and.

Speaker 3 (01:25:58):
This sort of thing.

Speaker 2 (01:25:59):
But as an aspirational ideal of the rock solidness of
that magnetic drawback to home, it is a superhuman almost
depiction and a marriage that can survive so much that
it becomes a model for all marriages afterwards in many ways.

Speaker 1 (01:26:15):
And despite the movies and movies I have, I'm looking
forward to the Christopher Nolan film, but also I'm a
little hesitant some of the images I've seen. I don't
know who those medieval armored men are supposed to be, Like,
what is that? But if they tell the story, I mean,

(01:26:36):
of course I'm going to watch it, you know, I'm.

Speaker 2 (01:26:39):
Not watch it the way I try to look at it.
And I am I am no fan of Emily Wilson,
but I am working through her book so and she's
very talented. She's a very talented writer. I think it
is attempting to do too. I think Christopher Nolan is
attempting to do with the Odyssey something like what Amazon

(01:27:00):
I did with Lord of the Rings the Rings of
Power series, which is to sort of pick it up
and rome with it. And I think I don't think
Christopher Nolan is malicious. I think he's taking a sort
of artistic license to the production to try to he
might say, like breathe new life into it. Yeah, and
I think he's gonna run up into a lot of people.
I think he underestimates how attached people are to this story.

Speaker 1 (01:27:23):
You know. And that's the thing with retelling the Iliad
and the Odyssey and the series that I'm writing is
about twenty five years before the war. So you have
Priam and Hecuba as a young couple. Hector's like five,
She's pregnant with Paris. That's where it starts. And you know,

(01:27:43):
and I had to work out a timeline because you
realize that the mythology doesn't have a timeline that you know,
whoever was, whoever was telling the story, didn't sit around
go well, you know what, Homer said this time, Well,
this can't happen before that or after that, and then
all of the fragments of the before and after. But yes,

(01:28:04):
I forgot what I was going to say.

Speaker 2 (01:28:06):
Yeah, I mean, like you described that the men in
medieval armor. Apparently those men in medieval armor are supposed
to be the Lastonians, And I was like, okay, someone
asked me about that, and I looked up, as I've
been trained to do, the etymology of the word Lastrigonian.
It seems to mean hide gatherer or hide reaper, people

(01:28:30):
who collect hides, raw.

Speaker 1 (01:28:32):
Hides from the people they were eating.

Speaker 2 (01:28:36):
They were from animals. There were cannibals, yes, And so
when I look at that medieval plate armor, I'm like,
this doesn't look like hide. This doesn't look like the
barbaric associations we would associate, we would group with cannibals.
This looks like this looks like something almost space age
like in many ways. Yeah, so it's you know, I'm

(01:28:59):
I'm not excited about it, but I'm I'm curious what
the long term consequences will be because we are talking
about Homer more because of it, and I'm not going
to complain about that. And even even in his attempt
to sort of subvert it. And I don't think he's
intending to, but he's explicitly talked about Emily Wilson being

(01:29:20):
a large inspiration, and Emily Wilson very much is trying
to subvert the story. As I've been working through, I
keep running into little things that she does in the text.
And she's a very again, very skillful writer. It's very
well written, the lines flow very nicely, but she keeps
doing these little things, like she adds this line he
failed to line four or five in book one, which

(01:29:43):
which again it very concretely, albeit subtly, puts the blame
on Odysseus for what happened to his comrades, where and
she kind of glosses very quickly the other parts is
and for their what was her exact line, I have
it right here before the their own mistakes, they died
or something something very quick. Whereas Homer really, like in

(01:30:05):
the Greek like, drives the point very firmly. I'll find
it later. But in book two, line.

Speaker 3 (01:30:12):
Sixty is it line sixty two or something?

Speaker 2 (01:30:15):
She has this line. I'll read from line sixty, I
would be useless. This is Telemachus complaining, basically speaking about
the situation of things in Ithaca and saying, I can't
stand against these suitors. So here's how I'm feeling. Here's
how you should feel.

Speaker 3 (01:30:30):
You should be ashamed.

Speaker 2 (01:30:31):
He says. This is the Wilson translation. It is unbearable what.

Speaker 3 (01:30:34):
They have done.

Speaker 2 (01:30:35):
They ruined my whole house. It is not fair. You
suitors should all feel ashamed. When I read that, I'm like,
it's not fair. That's a strange line in English that
comes across as very bratty, very like entitled. It's not fair.

Speaker 3 (01:30:49):
It's like a child throwing a tanstrum kind of thing.

Speaker 1 (01:30:52):
It's like saying Achilles is a cry baby, right.

Speaker 2 (01:30:54):
So I looked into Fagels and Lattimore.

Speaker 3 (01:30:57):
They didn't have that.

Speaker 2 (01:30:59):
So I went to the per se this project so
wonderful resource.

Speaker 3 (01:31:02):
Sorry about that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:03):
Anyone can look to online to look at the original Greek.
Nothing like that line. Nothing like that line, which means
Emily Wilson added that three sentence clause specifically to make
Telemachus sound braddier and more entitled and more complaining than Homer.

Speaker 1 (01:31:19):
Has you know that that was? Did you happen to
see the film The Return?

Speaker 2 (01:31:24):
I did not.

Speaker 1 (01:31:24):
No, Okay, So I watched that and I had very
high hopes for it. And you know, the best scene
was Argos out of the whole because we saw Argos.
I named one of my dog's Argos nice. I love
our ghosts. But that film depicted Telemachus as very like immature,

(01:31:46):
and Braddy, I didn't I didn't like. I didn't like
it because of the how Telemachus was. I mean, it
was very much you could you could make a case
that the Odyssey is also Telemachus is coming of age
story because he's he's going in the By the end
of the story, he crosses over from being a boy

(01:32:08):
or the adolescent to being a man.

Speaker 2 (01:32:10):
You know.

Speaker 1 (01:32:11):
Yeah, I kind of envisioned him at the at the
end of it, here's my beard, Like it just he
woke up and here's my beard. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:32:18):
The transformation sort of begins at the beginning, but it continues.
And the things that the thing that separates Telemachus from
the other suitors is the suitors didn't go to war, right,
they stayed home the whole time. But Telemachus has to
go out upon the unharvestable sea, right, and that's his
that's his going out. That's his heroic phase. He has

(01:32:41):
to go out and find news of his father and
risk danger to go.

Speaker 1 (01:32:44):
That's step five of the hero journey. Even you have
to travel beyond I mean if we just cam.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
Yeah, but it's it's following in his father's footsteps. Literally,
where did my father go? Let me find news of it?
And it's that the the Suitors never went on that
and because they never they never mentally connected with the
heroes of the past by doing as they did, going
out where they went, and.

Speaker 1 (01:33:10):
Is literally met up with Menalaus. He literally by the
time that story, yes, yes, he is talking to the
heroes of the past.

Speaker 2 (01:33:20):
Yes, who are still mentally connecting with them. Yes, And
that facilitates the power of recognition through familiarity. And these
suitors are unable to recognize Athena, They're unable to recognize
Odysseus because they never went on that journey. They never
even entered the hero phase. I have a little flow

(01:33:42):
chart in the hero of the Man of like, you know,
there's the heroic phase and then there's a risk of
disillusion versus becoming a man. But before you even get
to the hero phase, you can to borrow some Joseph
Campbell language, refuse the call and not follow the call
to adventure. And there's a cost to that. And the
cost is you never develop that mental connection with your society,

(01:34:05):
with the heroes of the past. You can never actually
become a man in the archetypal sense, in this very
technical meaning we have with Odysseus if you don't go
through that heroic phase first. You know, so these two
archetypal roles seem to be symbiotic. They require each other,
and you can create culture and art and a society,

(01:34:27):
a functioning society and ordered society with these two working together.
Even though they are intention they are intention like male
and female, but they work together at the same time.
And the hope is that you can go on that
heroic journey and swing back like Telemachus did and Odysseus
ultimately did. His great accomplishment is managing to make it

(01:34:50):
all the way back. And this is beautifully and I
think very symbolically captured in Nestor's speech to his son.
We're trying to teach him how to win a chariot.
He says, don't touch the turning post or you'll crash,
you know, But get as close to it as possible,
get swing right around the edge, and then swing around

(01:35:10):
and come.

Speaker 3 (01:35:11):
Back to the finish line.

Speaker 2 (01:35:12):
And it is revealed that the turning post they're using
to swing the charis around is the tomb or sign
of some unknown hero, dead hero from the past, which
which sort of represents the goal is to to come
near it, circle around it, but don't touch it, don't
become a hero, don't die a hero's death, but if

(01:35:33):
you do, there is compensation for it. And and his
son does in fact die protecting his father tragically.

Speaker 1 (01:35:42):
I often wonder what would have happened if Achilles would
have left and he would have gone back and raised Neoptolemus.
How different the stories would be. I get to as
a as a writer, I get to do the what
if part.

Speaker 2 (01:35:55):
This is the I was about to say, This is
where wonderful people like you come in. We have another
one of Nikos Cousinsakus's books, aside from the Odyssey of
Modern Sequel, is the Last Passion of Christ. Nicos Cousinsacus
was uniquely aware of and I try to spend some
time on it in my book too. But the connection
between the archetype of the hero and Christianity. And what

(01:36:18):
Nikos Cousinsacus dwells on in the Last Temptation of Christ
is what if instead of Achilles.

Speaker 3 (01:36:23):
What if Jesus went home?

Speaker 2 (01:36:25):
What if Jesus refused the call to become the savior
of humanity? All right, I'm speaking literarily here, not as
a Christian, but there's a very important, you know, thematic
crossover here. And what if he did not die on
the cross and abandoned his teaching and lived as a
as a private man, an idiot in the Greek with

(01:36:47):
a wife and children she could have had, and he
goes through that and he lives that whole life out
in his mind before he faces the choice and ultimately
does take the heroic path the call. But that what
if is fascinating to think about. I know, and it's
uh and and I mean we could we could go

(01:37:08):
completely the other direction, as James Joyce did with Ulysses,
and be like, instead of instead of one man spending
twenty years to come home, what if we take one
man trying not to come home for one day to
a to a faithless wife instead. What does that look like? Yeah,
there's and and what I love about those kinds of stories.
Is that. I mean, that's that's in the tradition of

(01:37:29):
these stories. And as many of the people have pointed
out who tried to defend Emily Wilson and and the
and the Return and other adaptations, is to say, well,
weren't all these oral traditions doing this. Weren't they all
kind of playing fast and loose with the facts to
make a better story, a more interesting story. And yes
they were. What bothers me specific about Emily Wilson is

(01:37:51):
her depiction of it as a translation rather than as
an adaptation. And those are different things. And I think
adaptations are fine. When I see when I see Disney's Hercules,
I enjoy it is fun. It's set in this kind
of quasi New York setting. Everybody in the York well
the big all of itself is thebes. It's great, it's fun.
We've maintained the themes and these we've set these same

(01:38:14):
themes in a new setting, and we've breathed new life
into it, made it interesting, taking out some of the
bits that maybe aren't appropriate for kids, which is fine
and correct, which.

Speaker 1 (01:38:23):
Is quite a lot in Greek mythology.

Speaker 2 (01:38:25):
Yes it is, Yes, it really is where I think
people are led astray, is when an adaptation and a
transformation of a story is passed off as a as
a truthful retelling of the author's intent. We can all
have opinions about Odysseus, and indeed, going back to Odysseus's day,

(01:38:45):
many people did not like Odysseus. Socrates had some critical
things to say about Odysseus. We're very much in the
tradition of having criticisms of Odysseus. Homer was not. Homer
had very good things to.

Speaker 3 (01:38:56):
Say about Odysseus.

Speaker 2 (01:38:57):
So it is perfectly valid to critic Odysseus. It is
not valid to very slyly move words around two people
who are not familiar with the Greek. The impression that
Homer himself was creating this kind of modern or rather postmodern,
kind of morally gray anti hero character in Odysseus, That's

(01:39:20):
not what was happening.

Speaker 1 (01:39:22):
Yeah, I think that. I'm like, I read The Song
of Achilles, which I loved when it came out, But
some people have read that and love it and they
think it's a They think it's a retelling of the
Iliad and it's not. And it's like it's the very
things it's not. And so you know, and I know

(01:39:43):
that there's probably criticisms about the you know what I've
done with my series.

Speaker 2 (01:39:48):
But I wrote a book and got criticism.

Speaker 1 (01:39:51):
Yeah, yeah, you know, And I don't know if people
are going to some of those I don't make him
a bad guy. I make him he's troubled and he
struggles with borrow your word the reconnection part.

Speaker 3 (01:40:03):
M h.

Speaker 2 (01:40:04):
Well, it is important to It is important to remind
others and ourselves too.

Speaker 3 (01:40:09):
We don't have to agree with Homer.

Speaker 2 (01:40:11):
Yeah, you know, we don't. We don't have to. We
can we can do Shakespeare didn't agree with Homer in
his depiction of their sides. Troylis and Cressida is not
cast as a retelling of the Trojan War. It is
its own story, following its own version of these characters,
and no one owns the characters. These characters exist in

(01:40:31):
a kind of esthetic commons that I think we have
a duty to be thoughtful towards and respectful of. But
we don't have to follow the story. We can do
crazy things like Joyce's stream of consciousness stuff. We can
play around with them, we can we can do our
own things with them. It's the it's the pretense of

(01:40:52):
you know, translating how the hero and the man is
my interpretation, m h. But there are many interpretations, some.

Speaker 3 (01:40:58):
Of which conflict with my mind.

Speaker 2 (01:41:00):
And people can have disagreements or even falling out. And
if we're if we have a particularly powerful falling out,
maybe a poet will even write a story about our phone.

Speaker 1 (01:41:08):
Right, but I was gonna say, I know we're we're
going on two hours. Look at that. I could just
talk forever and ever. I know, my favorite translation of
the Iliad is Caroline Alexander's.

Speaker 2 (01:41:21):
Wonderful translation, top top tier.

Speaker 1 (01:41:23):
I love her translation.

Speaker 2 (01:41:25):
You know what, you know what annoys me the most
about Caroline alexander translation?

Speaker 3 (01:41:29):
She didn't do the Odyssey?

Speaker 1 (01:41:31):
I know, I was just I was just googling that
the other day, like, did she do? Is she going?

Speaker 2 (01:41:36):
She would still alive? She's still alive? So we could
we could we could start a pressure campaign.

Speaker 1 (01:41:41):
I don't know how, but I really, I mean, my
copy of her Iliad is completely underlined, annotated, sticky noted.
It's embarrassing.

Speaker 2 (01:41:55):
It's it's a it's an it's a truly truly top
top tier up toa She's.

Speaker 1 (01:42:01):
Not talked about that much. I don't see. I got
people say Fagels, Fagels, and I did read Fagels. That
was my first you know what house back, you know,
learning about Homer. Fagels was my first translation of the
Odyssey and the Iliad, and then I did have Latimore
and Fitzgerald after that, but those are a little more

(01:42:22):
to me, a little more dry. Yeah, but Caroline Alexander,
I was like, oh my god, I'm just eating this up.

Speaker 2 (01:42:29):
It's it's truly great. The first person I heard commentates
on translations was actually Christopher Hitchens talking about his preference
for the Latimore translation. And I the more I've read,
the less I've come to like Latimore. He's fine, he's good.
I have no insults intended as a matter of taste.
There's a certain I've come to appreciate the importance of

(01:42:53):
the poetry aspect and the meter, and so prose. You
can you can have good prose with with a metered
flow without it being like meter, you know, without writing
an iambic pentameter or I joke about someone writing an
anipestic tetrameter translation. The doctor zeus rhyme scheme. Yeah, but

(01:43:15):
like Emily Wilson does a very good iambic pentameter, and
someone I used to really dislike, but I've kind of
come back around to contra Nicholson is the Alexander Pope translation,
very fast and loose with literalism, but you know that
flow matters, you know. And I think my personal favorite,

(01:43:35):
which I didn't even try to justify for many years,
I didn't even try to explain. I just said it's
not the best. I just like it for personal reasons.
But I've come around to understanding on the poetic side.
Why like it is? This Lang translation Andrew Lang does
a phenomenal just it reads very nicely, it flows well,
and it fits in your back pocket. Yeah, quite lovely.

Speaker 1 (01:43:56):
That's probably what Alexander had under his pillow.

Speaker 2 (01:44:00):
Yes, he probably had the Laying eighteen twelve transit, right,
But I mean, there's no substitute for the Greek, and
I'm inching my way through through more Greek, and I
like to I like to practice it every chance I get.
I apologize to anyone if I come off as pretentious.
My Greek is terrible. If me saying Greek sounds pretentious,
anyone who speaks ancient Greek will be like no, it's

(01:44:21):
like very amateur.

Speaker 1 (01:44:23):
There's there's some guy on social media that sings Greek.

Speaker 2 (01:44:27):
Na have you seen that?

Speaker 1 (01:44:29):
And he's just like he sings and he does all
the things and.

Speaker 2 (01:44:32):
That so good, so good.

Speaker 1 (01:44:34):
Yeah, I know.

Speaker 2 (01:44:35):
There's a very very controversial character in the world of
philosophy named Kolstane Ala Mariu. He runs a podcast under
a pseudonym called Caribbean Rhythms, and he's got a couple
episodes up on Homer and the Only and he reads
like forty lines or so in just perfect Greek. It's

(01:44:55):
extraordinary to listen to. My first listening to the Greek
was Lombardos only Lombardo reading some of his opening translation.
It's good enough. It's not like aurum Or or Coastin
and their reading, but it's one of the delightful things.
To bring it back to your point about social media
is we can we can learn from people like that,
and it's you know, it has its downsides, it's drawbacks,

(01:45:17):
it's it's poison pills from the lotus eaters to be
wary of and to reject. But if we you know,
strap ourselves firmly enough to the mast and carry on
our way. We can, we can get a lot of
value and beauty out of it along the way.

Speaker 1 (01:45:32):
Well, I'm going to say that at the two hour
mark we can wrap this conversation up. I can see
us having more conversations after this.

Speaker 2 (01:45:41):
Thanks so much for having me on. It's an absolute
pleasure to chat and it's always, it's always, it's the
most valuable thing to talk about.

Speaker 4 (01:45:47):
I think, yeah, this is great. I had a good time.

Speaker 2 (01:46:03):
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